Saturday, October 01, 2011

Demise of google labs

I was watching a presentation last night, part of which was musing about the feeling that no new music genre had appeared for quite some time and, well, I kind of lost the plot after that because I started thinking about how I could check out the rise and fall of different genres using language. I started thinking that I would use Google sets to generate a list of genres and then I'd look at the frequency with which they appear in the Google books corpus over time.

But this morning, when I went to Google sets, it was gone. Not only that, but it seems that the entire Google Labs enterprise is not long for this world. This was announced about two months ago, but nobody told me about it. Anyhow, anybody know a replacement for Google sets?

2 comments:

Mark Davies said...

>> Anyhow, anybody know a replacement for Google sets?

For American English (155 billion words): http://googlebooks.byu.edu.

Also, I've applied for a grant to make all of the Google Books datasets available via the same interface.

Brett said...

Google sets is (was) a little different from the ngram viewer. You put in, some exemplars and it would spit out a list of similar items.